We can do this with the recently released Stack Overflow Trends tool, which lets us examine what mobile-related technologies have been growing and shrinking in developer activity, and gives us a glimpse of what the future might look like.

Android and iOS

The vast majority of Stack Overflow questions about mobile development come down to the Android and iOS platforms.

Apple launched the iPhone App Store in June 2008, just a few months before Stack Overflow was founded, and we see a rapid growth in questions with the iPhone tag during the site’s first year. Apple rebranded the iPhone’s operating system to “iOS” in 2010, which meant the iOS tag soon replaced “iPhone.”

In the meantime, the Android operating system, released the same year, steadily rose in usage among developers, until by 2012 it made up 8% of the site’s questions. Since then, the two platforms have stayed steady over time, with the Android platform typically getting about twice as many questions per month as iOS.

The Trends tool lets us explore particular tags related to these platforms.

Within Android development, one notable shift was the introduction of the Android Studio IDE in 2013, which quickly became one of the most asked about tags related to the platform. There was also a quick expansion of interest in Xamarin for Android when Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016. We can see Google’s Volley library for HTTP connections maintain a small but steady level of interest in the last few years.

Besides the shift from the “iPhone” tag to the “iOS” tag, we can see other relevant developments in the iOS ecosystem. When the iPad was released in 2010 the iPad tag attracted a burst of questions, but as of today most questions are simply about the “iOS” tag.

Windows Phone and Blackberry

Neither Blackberry nor Windows Phone ever got the traction among app developers that Android and iOS did. (Note that Windows Phone questions are usually tagged with the specific version, such as Windows-Phone-7, rather than the raw Windows-Phone tag).

We can see a small burst in questions about Windows Phone 7 development in 2010 when the platform was introduced, then smaller bumps for 8 and 8.1, but the interest wasn’t sustained, and as of this month they make up only about 1 in 10,000 Stack Overflow questions. Blackberry development makes up an even smaller portion of questions and effectively disappeared by 2014.

Cross-Platform Frameworks

There are several increasingly popular tools for developing cross-platform applications that can be deployed on both Android and iOS.

Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) was one of the earlier cross-platform frameworks, and it was the most popular in terms of Stack Overflow questions until Xamarin caught up with it in 2016. You can see a sudden bump for Xamarin right when it was bought by Microsoft.

More recently the Ionic framework, built on top of Cordova, has gotten a surge of interest. And even more recently, Facebook’s open source React Native package has shown rapid growth to catch up with the others; it’s among the fastest growing tags on the entire site.

These frameworks still get an order of magnitude fewer questions than the general iOS and Android platforms, but these trends still indicate that there’s a lot of developer interest in cross-platform applications.

Backend as a service

One shift that interested me was between two backend-as-a-service products often used with mobile applications, Firebase and Parse. (Other related tags, such as PubNub, don’t yet have quite enough questions to be included in the Stack Overflow Trends tool).

The two events weren’t strictly related (though others have noticed the connection) but it’s still interesting to see how these seismic shifts in developer technologies can occur. Though it depends on how one measures it, the sudden drop in Parse and the rise in Firebase are two of the biggest month-to-month shifts in a technology’s questions in Stack Overflow’s history.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in exploring languages, technologies, or frameworks that weren’t discussed in this post, you can use the Stack Overflow Trends tool to discover how the developer ecosystem is changing and where it might be going in the future.

And if you are a Stack Overflow user, our new Stack Overflow mobile app is now available to help you view, answer, post and vote on the go.

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Comments

Someone

Why a new App what is wrong with the other one?

Szymon Stasik

as for cross-platform hybrid solutions there is also NativeScript gaining more and more interest.

Jon

You data scientists have way too much time on your hands. There comes a point when all of these graphs are meaningless. Every other day you guys have a post about how you are looking at data (via R) and how it relates but it is just too much. After a while this “cool” stuff starts to get dull rather quick.

Martin Konicek

I haven’t seen many of the other blog posts but find this one super interesting. It got some traction on Twitter.

It’s likely writing the posts is a part of the job of data scientists at Stack Overflow as opposed to having too much free time. It’s a way to increase visibility for the company – people talk about the posts on Twitter etc.